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Claims with no citations? You're either an idiot or an outright troll/liar.

A small sampling of the citations linked in the post in question:
http://www.city-journal.org/20...
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
http://www.umass.edu/legal/Ben...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publ...
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub...
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/abst...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/abst...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinf...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/app/abst...
http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/...
http://www.sentencingproject.o...
http://online.wsj.com/articles...
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
https://www.law.upenn.edu/live...
That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short.

Research results are unclear. Some studies have found a link between sitting and bad health, and also found that exercising doesn't offset the sitting. Other studies have found a much weaker correllation, so maybe sitting all day isn't that big of a deal.

Disclaimer: I have a stand-up desk in my office ($39 folding table from Costco with 4 sections of PVC pipe to extend the legs, and a 2 inch thick anti-fatigue mat to stand on), and I use it about 4 hours per day.

I first wanted to say thank you for holding your scientific position here in the face of ignorant objections.

AthanasiusKircher, this sort of research is as profoundly unscientific as it comes (including the stuff you quote from Cook et al). And your comments are just as bad. For example, consensus about what? Notice that the alleged 97% consensus is relatively accurate when the claim is that there is global warming. It goes down once you add that the global warming is human-induced. And then it goes down much further when the claim is that the impact is catastrophic or severe over the next 50 to 100 years to 41%. 41% is a bit less than 97%, right? I suspect you will find similar divided opinion on the matter of whether immediate mitigation efforts are required right now. James L. Powell's 99.99% paper is ridiculous and you can see that just by looking through the methodology. It doesn't measure what it claims to measure. You can't get more damning than that. Yet once again, we have these slashdot posts talking about scientific positions and holding the line in the face of "ignorant objections".

You may not like Powell, but he is entirely clear about his methodologies, about how he measures what he measures, and about what data he used. You can certainly disagree with his conclusion, but if you want to be taken serious, you should actually do the work of re-doing the analysis with the same transparency and provide a clear argument for your different interpretation (if it still differs - "Powell is totally wrong, the consensus is only 99.3%" ;--).

I think we are now into infinite regression territory. Everybody who is scientifically literate and looks at the primary literature (and by than I don't mean propaganda blogs) can easily determine the prevailing position. And with a bit of experience in reviewing it's also easy to see the quality (rare) and scope (narrow) of the very few disagreeing publications. But that apparently is not good enough, and we get nit-picking from people who don't like the consensus. What we don't see are significant publications providing alternative explanations.

So now we have meta-analyses, where people go to great length to analyse papers, to count positions, to interview scientists, and to publish their findings in the peer-reviewed literature. But that apparently is not good enough either, and we get nit-picking from people who don't like the consensus. What we don't see are significant academic publications showing that there is indeed no consensus - the best we get is the occasional opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal or the 17 year old fraudulent Oregon Petition.

What's next? Meta-meta studies? Meta-meta-meta-studies? As far as I can tell, the opposition to the consensus is largely immune to rational arguments - "global warming is a hoax invented by the Chinese" is one of the more prominent stupidities in this field.

I first wanted to say thank you for holding your scientific position here in the face of ignorant objections.

AthanasiusKircher, this sort of research is as profoundly unscientific as it comes (including the stuff you quote from Cook et al). And your comments are just as bad. For example, consensus about what?

Notice that the alleged 97% consensus is relatively accurate when the claim is that there is global warming. It goes down once you add that the global warming is human-induced. And then it goes down much further when the claim is that the impact is catastrophic or severe over the next 50 to 100 years to 41%. 41% is a bit less than 97%, right?

I suspect you will find similar divided opinion on the matter of whether immediate mitigation efforts are required right now.

James L. Powell's 99.99% paper is ridiculous and you can see that just by looking through the methodology. It doesn't measure what it claims to measure. You can't get more damning than that. Yet once again, we have these slashdot posts talking about scientific positions and holding the line in the face of "ignorant objections".

>As it happens, pollution caused coral dieback is also the cause of the 'pacific atoms vanishing below the rising oceans'. This, a \n Did you mean 'atol'? If you did they are the product of plate tectonics http://gji.oxfordjournals.org/... is a good follow up to the WIKI stuff on guyots.

You can start brandishing the term 'racist' as negative when you can convince me that Australian Aborigines don't have better eyesight than Europeans. Good luck. We're not all equal.

Race is not ethnicity. Less than a 100 years ago irish and italians were not considered "white" while some asians were considered ambiguously white.

In fact, the definition of race in OED includes:

1.2 A group of people sharing the same culture, history, language, etc.; an ethnic group.

1.3 A group or set of people or things with a common feature or features.

I'm sure all of these facts are like water on a ducks back to someone using the racially archaic "Mohammedan." But to anyone else reading along who isn't a total racist asshole, now you have a fact based counter-narrative.

which means pipe smokers who inhale live as long as nonsmokers, and pipe smokers that donâ(TM)t inhale live longer than non-smokers.

This doesn't make any sense. The tobacco in pipes is sold by the same companies that make the cigarettes, so one would expect it to be similarly bad.
In fact a quick google turns up numerous studies that say just that: example graph

So pipe smokers and cigar smokers are very similar in developing cancers and mortality rates. Cigarette smokers do worse for some cancers and better for other.
As to why: I read a study years ago that concluded that smokers of "light" cigarettes developed deeper and more lethal lung cancers because they inhaled more/deeper to get the same amount of nicotine.
Cigar and pipe smokers typically inhale more shallowly, which may explain why they develop cancer of the larynx instead.

Counterpoint. This is only the largest study; there are a lot of less-interesting studies that try to reproduce a lot of studies which, as you pointed out, do exist and do show a lot of good data that second-hand smoke causes health issues. My problem is with this:

the vast preponderance of evidence points one way, and it's not the way you say it does.

There *is* a vast preponderance of evidence pointing one way, in the same way that there's a vast preponderance of evidence that video games make kids into murderers or that homosexuality can be cured by therapy akin to torture. There's also a significant failure rate in reproducing those same studies; a full examination of the evidence shows only weak statistical linkage, if any.

I actually rewrote that claim multiple times before posting. It would be incorrect to say that second-hand cigarette smoke has been shown *not* to cause any health effects, in spite of the rather large and statistically-sound study released recently; it has *not* *reliably* been shown to cause any health effects. There is no overwhelming body of evidence; there is a lot of difficult analysis that's hard to control for, and a lot of outcomes that don't reproduce well. The level of certainty is about even with chance.

There is also a lot of evidence that high-carbohydrate diets (above 40% of calories) cause arterial build-up, and high-fat diets do not. The original consensus is based on flawed statistics, and current studies don't yet reconcile a concrete position.

There is also emerging literature suggesting AHA-recommended levels of sodium cause heart attacks. Below 1350mg/day will likely cause your heart to stop (too much potassium will do this, too); while high levels of sodium (up to 6,000mg/day) have no detrimental effect after about 3 days. Your kidneys release hormones to restore homeostatic balance and pump all that sodium out of your blood, but it takes a few days and you have high blood pressure until then. Keeping people on diets long-term is hard, and flaky; modern research looks at high-sodium-intake societies and compares heart attack rates with low-sodium-intake societies, which has its own problems.

The thing is we have cancer groups, the USDA, CDC, and AHA ignoring new literature and doubling-down on old literature. We also have economists contradicting the BLS on things like minimum wage. Every large organization takes a position and uses evidence to back it up; the whole of evidence necessarily outpaces them, because shifting your position as a large entity requires a much stronger degree of certainty than doing it as a small entity.

There are a lot of studies that support that, and a lot that show no link. Collecting all of one type or another can let you show that vaccines cause autism, for example.

Then there's a decade-long study of 76,000 women, the largest one in history, that attempts to single-handedly get a definitive answer (it doesn't work that way, but this is pretty strong evidence).

When humans stop eating meat and switch to whole-food plant based diets, the rates of all leading causes of death (obesity, cancer, heart disease, and pretty diseases of inflammation) drop. To anyone with a scientific mind, modern nutritional-science's data should pretty much indict animal based foods as the direct cause of obesity, along with the consumption of heavily processed foods. It's no wonder that the nations with the highest meat consumption have the highest rates of lifestyle diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc.

A tiny sample of the tens of thousands of papers stemming from clinical studies of meat's role in disease
Non-industry funded Research

Meat consumption is associated with obesity and central obesity among US adults
International Journal of Obesity (2009) 33, 621–628; doi:10.1038/ijo.2009.45; published online 24 March 2009
http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v33/n6/abs/ijo200945a.html

DIET, OBESITY, AND RISK OF FATAL PROSTATE CANCER
Am. J. Epidemiol. (1984) 120 (2): 244-250. 1.
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/120/2/244.short

Diet and body mass index in 38000 EPIC-Oxford meat-eaters, fish-eaters, vegetarians and vegans
International Journal of Obesity (2003) 27, 728–734. doi:10.1038/sj.ijo.0802300
http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v27/n6/abs/0802300a.html

Prevalence of obesity is low in people who do not eat meat.
Key T, Davey G. BMJ: British Medical Journal. 1996;313(7060):816-817.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2352221/

Meat consumption and prospective weight change in participants of the EPIC-PANACEA study.
Vergnaud AC1, Norat T, Romaguera D, Mouw T, May AM, Travier N, Luan J, Wareham N, Slimani N, Rinaldi S, Couto E, Clavel-Chapelon F, Boutron-Ruault MC, Cottet V, Palli D, Agnoli C, Panico S, Tumino R, Vineis P, Agudo A, Rodriguez L, Sanchez MJ, Amiano P, Barricarte A, Huerta JM, Key TJ, Spencer EA, Bueno-de-Mesquita B, Büchner FL, Orfanos P, Naska A, Trichopoulou A, Rohrmann S, Hermann S, Boeing H, Buijsse B, Johansson I, Hellstrom V, Manjer J, Wirfält E, Jakobsen MU, Overvad K, Tjonneland A, Halkjaer J, Lund E, Braaten T, Engeset D, Odysseos A, Riboli E, Peeters PH.
Am J Clin Nutr August 2010. vol. 92 no. 2 398-407
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/92/2/398.short

Type of Vegetarian Diet, Body Weight, and Prevalence of Type 2 Diabetes
Serena Tonstad, Terry Butler, Ru Yan, Gary E. Fraser. Diabetes Care May 2009, 32 (5) 791-796; DOI: 10.2337/dc08-1886
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/32/5/791.short

The AHA, ACS, and CDC all have 50-year-old research and positions on these things. They lag behind modern science by an enormous margin.

In a study of 76,000 women, current and former smokers had statistically higher chances of lung cancer; exposure to second hand smoke showed NOTHING.

Studies that show links between second-hand smoke and disease are almost universally case-control, where you find someone who has a disease and ask if they were exposed to a potential cause. This kind of study overwhelmingly shows us that video games cause people to be violent psychopaths and should be abolished from society. Actual scientists involved in this kind of research have, for a *long* time, expected that the 7,300 lung cancers claimed caused by second-hand smoke might be more approximately ZERO.

Modern research can't find a link between nicotine in particular and heart disease, at all; nicotine is known to be non-carcinogenic at this point, but cigarettes have hundreds of toxic chemicals. The thing toxicologists know that you don't is those chemicals disperse in air and become laughably-minor doses, in the same way that eating a pound of salt WILL KILL YOU while drinking a half an ounce of automobile antifreeze won't do a damned thing to you. The thing CDC, AHA, and ACS know that you don't is they're not obligated to follow rigorous scientific standards; they have a mission, and they can use any flawed research available that was once generally-accepted and hasn't been firmly stamped out in the public mind to pursue that mission, as they can defend their "best judgement" as long as it's not well-known and well-accepted by the greater populous that they're wrong, and damn what the latest and most effective science says.

It's the same thing as red meat having NO SCIENTIFICALLY-VALID NEGATIVE HEALTH EFFECTS, while the Pork lobby had the campaign, "Pork: The Other White Meat" in the height of the red meat health scare because pork is red meat (nutritionally), but considered white meat in a culinary sense (they found a legal way to falsely market pork as a healthy alternative to red meat when it is, in fact, red meat).

We call this "critical thinking".

Do you realize that nearly every modern study on the safety of vaccinations is invalid?

Nearly every study conducted uses the VAERS data - this data is scientifically worthless.
https://vaers.hhs.gov/index

You see, it's not mandated reporting. When reactions occur, even ones documented as potential reactions to a given vaccine, doctors will refuse to report it. Most doctors dismiss nearly any claim or concern of potential reactions out of hand. Responding, that incidents are rare. Of course, the basis for that statement is the VAERS data, which as we've just stated is not being reported to by doctors. And why would doctors not report such incidents?

1. Normalcy bias, they are indoctrinated that vaccines are safe, they have been told they are and so they believe they are. And most of them, most of the time... ARE...but not always.

2. Doctors receive a lot of kickbacks and perks from big pharmaceutical corporations. Who wants to lose those?

3. Wait, I am a doctor, I am already paying a small fortune in malpractice insurance. Why would I ever optionally report an incident with a vaccine I have administered and put me at risk for a lawsuit. When I can simply say its not the vaccine and move on.

The truth is, vaccines cause way more incidents than are documents. Incidents may even be occurring which we do not even have associated. Many of the outbreaks are NOT due to anti-vaxxers. Think about it., most kids have been vaccinated. In most of the country you cannot attend school if you have not (yes, exceptions are available, religious waivers, etc. but these are in fact rarely used).

But but....but I saw an article that stated the individuals were not vaccinated. No...they just couldn't provide records of the vaccinations. Most parents would have a tough time coughing up copies of records for the nearly hundred vaccinations their kids have received. Lack of record, doesn't mean they weren't vaccinated. Was there a waiver on file with the school? Nope? Oh, then they probably were in fact vaccinated, or they wouldn't be in the school.

Okay, so what's really going on with these outbreaks of old diseases? Well consider this scientific principal....viruses evolve. Many of our vaccines were originally formulated decades ago. Meanwhile, every year these virus have altered themselves. Eventually they diversify enough that the old vaccines are less effective against new strains. Oh , but if that's the case why wouldn't they create a new vaccine?

One, we have millions of doses stockpiled. Admitting that their efficacy is reduced and they need to be replaced, would require the disposal of all those doses. That's a significant financial loss.
http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/...

Second, it's a long and laborious process to get a new vaccine formulation approved. MMR has it's roots in a 1968 development formulation. That is almost 50 years, which in the life span of a virus is like tens of thousands of years.

It's far easier to claim that the outbreak is due to anti-vaxxers who weren't vaccinated. Then to initiate what would amount to disposal and re-formulation at the costs of billions of dolars.

$
$$$
$$$$$

Does this mean I oppose vaccines. Heck no, but many of those claiming science, are about as much BS as the anti-vaxxers. And the truth is, children are hurt and die from vaccinations, and were we more honest, we could greatly reduce the quanity and risk of such incidents.

Regarding "Herd Immunity"

Herd immunity protects the following:

1. Anti-vaxxers who did not take the vaccine, and never are encounter it because it's largely been eradicated for their community.

2. Children and immuno-compromised individuals who have not had the vaccine or who's immune systems are no longer functioning.

Herd immunity is irrelevant to the vaccinated. If your children are vaccinated, and there are outbre

Do you realize that nearly every modern study on the safety of vaccinations is invalid?

Nearly every study conducted uses the VAERS data - this data is scientifically worthless.
https://vaers.hhs.gov/index

You see, it's not mandated reporting. When reactions occur, even ones documented as potential reactions to a given vaccine, doctors will refuse to report it. Most doctors dismiss nearly any claim or concern of potential reactions out of hand. Responding, that incidents are rare. Of course, the basis for that statement is the VAERS data, which as we've just stated is not being reported to by doctors. And why would doctors not report such incidents?

1. Normalcy bias, they are indoctrinated that vaccines are safe, they have been told they are and so they believe they are. And most of them, most of the time... ARE...but not always.

2. Doctors receive a lot of kickbacks and perks from big pharmaceutical corporations. Who wants to lose those?

3. Wait, I am a doctor, I am already paying a small fortune in malpractice insurance. Why would I ever optionally report an incident with a vaccine I have administered and put me at risk for a lawsuit. When I can simply say its not the vaccine and move on.

The truth is, vaccines cause way more incidents than are documents. Incidents may even be occurring which we do not even have associated. Many of the outbreaks are NOT due to anti-vaxxers. Think about it., most kids have been vaccinated. In most of the country you cannot attend school if you have not (yes, exceptions are available, religious waivers, etc. but these are in fact rarely used).

But but....but I saw an article that stated the individuals were not vaccinated. No...they just couldn't provide records of the vaccinations. Most parents would have a tough time coughing up copies of records for the nearly hundred vaccinations their kids have received. Lack of record, doesn't mean they weren't vaccinated. Was there a waiver on file with the school? Nope? Oh, then they probably were in fact vaccinated, or they wouldn't be in the school.

Okay, so what's really going on with these outbreaks of old diseases? Well consider this scientific principal....viruses evolve. Many of our vaccines were originally formulated decades ago. Meanwhile, every year these virus have altered themselves. Eventually they diversify enough that the old vaccines are less effective against new strains. Oh , but if that's the case why wouldn't they create a new vaccine?

One, we have millions of doses stockpiled. Admitting that their efficacy is reduced and they need to be replaced, would require the disposal of all those doses. That's a significant financial loss.
http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/...

Second, it's a long and laborious process to get a new vaccine formulation approved. MMR has it's roots in a 1968 development formulation. That is almost 50 years, which in the life span of a virus is like tens of thousands of years.

It's far easier to claim that the outbreak is due to anti-vaxxers who weren't vaccinated. Then to initiate what would amount to disposal and re-formulation at the costs of billions of dolars.

$
$$$
$$$$$

Does this mean I oppose vaccines. Heck no, but many of those claiming science, are about as much BS as the anti-vaxxers. And the truth is, children are hurt and die from vaccinations, and were we more honest, we could greatly reduce the quanity and risk of such incidents.

No study like this is going to be anything but passive. You can't force people to breathe in smoke for a study, so it's going to be hard to gather data and prove anything. That doesn't mean it's false.

If a smoker smokes, it's unhealthy. You can't argue that the same smoke is somehow sanitized if it didn't come from the butt-end of the cigarette (through an additional filter, usually). That's just plain illogical.

Even thirdhand smoke is being determined to be dangerous (thirdhand being the smell left behind on clothes, etc), causing damage to DNA.

I don't know, what such "biological basis" can possibly mean.

Well, here's some reading for you: Transgender: Evidence on the biological nature of gender identity. And Science in transition: Understanding the biology behind gender identity. And Structural Connectivity Networks of Transgender People

Any male body is much closer to Napoleon's, than it is to a female body.

Wow, you know nothing about genetics or biology, do you? Two unrelated people are much more dissimilar than fraternal twins, one of whom happens to be male and one female. Secondly, false analogy again: Someone who isn't Napoleon but claims he is has no biological basis for that claim. I am not claiming to be someone that I'm not. Quite the opposite: I am expressing my true gender identity as it is forged in my brain.

I contend, that "his own life" and "pushed onto others" are inseparable, if formulating and/or executing public policy is the person's very job.

You can contend that all you want, but it's false. Our former Prime Minister Stephen Harper was a religious Christian personally very opposed to abortion, but he did not force his views on the electorate, mostly because he knew he'd lose, but partly because Canada in recent years ironically has more of a tradition of keeping religion out of political discourse than the US. In the US, the Religious Right has been extremely successful in pushing policy changes that implement its religious views.

Likewise, your claim of facing high risk visiting a wrong bathroom because of Evangelicals remains unsubstantiated.

It was Evangelical pressure that got the North Carolina anti-LGBT bill passed, and there are bills pending in several states that are both explicitly anti-LGBT and claiming to be in support of "freedom of religion", just so long as your religion happens to be Christianity.

You can contend that all you want, but it's false. Our former Prime Minister Stephen Harper was quite religious and was personally opposed to abortion. However, he refused to reopen the abortion debate in Canada because most Canadians are pro-choice and he knew he could not force his religious beliefs on others. In the US, unfortunately, the religious right has been much more successful in forcing its beliefs on others.

BTW, you are yet to explain, why you single out Evangelicals so fervently?

We're talking about Donald Trump. If you want to see me to write nasty things about Islam, try looking at some postings I've made on Slashdot where Islam is a relevant part of the discussion. I assure you that I am an equal-opportunity religion-basher and think that Islam is one of the worst out there. But that's not the issue in the USA; evangelical Christianity is the issue there.

And if you must know, I'd certainly take Donald Trump over Ted Cruz, who is a poster-child for the dangerous religious extremist politician.

OK, then, what about this study? Good enough for you?

Here are 10 cases where armed citizens took down active shooters:
http://www.personaldefenseworl...

Google will find more.

Google will find 100 times the amount of cases where the shooter took down an armed victim first... And another 10 times the amount where a person not under threat was shot with their own gun.

Allow me to use research, instead of an obviously biased site based on unverified news reports.
https://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.full https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17922-carrying-a-gun-increases-risk-of-getting-shot-and-killed/

So it seems carrying a gun increases your risk of being shot and killed.

It should also be noted that the biggest risk from being shot and killed came from a family member, not a robbery.

Over three quarters (76.3 percent) of the homicide victims knew their assailant. Nearly one third (31.7 percent) of the homicides occurred during a family argument, 15.4 percent during a robbery, 4.1 percent during a drug deal, 0.2 percent during an abduction, and 44.1 percent for other unspecified reasons. In 4.5 percent of the homicides, multiple circumstances were reported.

Seems packing heat is a good way to kill the one you love.

You wrote:

Chicken pox itched like crazy, but wasn't life threatening and its spread is easy to prevent.

Chicken pox wasn't easy enough to eliminate before vaccines. And perhaps it wasn't life threatening for you but one of our sons had a classmate who had to have a liver transplant at age 3. (I'm sure poor lifestyle choices led to that...) Chicken pox could easily kill that child. Every time anyone in his school came down with any of several common illnesses, he had to stay home for several days. Vaccination is more than a personal issue.

Please don't lump me into the nutcases who believe that all misfortune in one's life is caused by sin.

I'm not arguing against vaccines, just that maybe not all vaccines should be mandatory. One of the reasons chicken pox wasn't eliminated was those "chicken pox parties" that our parents and grandparents used to throw. Chicken pox is generally more mild for children than adults (obvious exception for the very young), ergo neighbors would ask to expose their children when there was a case. As a parent, I made an informed decision to vaccinate my oldest at 15 months. My other child is too young.

Reye Syndrome. Reye syndrome, a disorder that causes sudden and dangerous liver and brain damage, is a side effect of aspirin therapy in children who have chickenpox or influenza. The disease can lead to coma and is life threatening. Symptoms include rash, vomiting, and confusion beginning about a week after the onset of the disease. Because of the strong warnings against children taking aspirin, this condition is, fortunately, very rare. Children should never be given aspirin when they have a viral infection or fever. Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is the preferred drug for fever or pain in patients younger than age 18 years.

Chickenpox Possible Complications (New York Times)

VZV hepatitis with acute liver failure appears to be an uncommon, yet frequently fatal condition. We searched MED-LINE (1966 – 1996) with the key words varicella and liver for additional cases.

Most of the patients described were immunocompromised for one or several reasons such as splenectomy, renal transplantation , bone-marrow transplantation, use of corticosteroids, and AIDS. ...

Varicella-Zoster Virus Infection Associated with Acute Liver Failure

There is nothing scientific about it, and the medical profession say the change has nothing to do with new scientific data. The sole motivation driving this was to make men equal to female.

As if this bullshit is going to reduce anyone with a penis to change their drinking habits. /s

Do you have a citation for that? The natural reason for it to vary by gender is because men are heavier than women, but in that case you're still better off giving both genders the same advice and giving them the option to scale by body mass. I don't see any other reason why men and women of the same size should have different alcohol recommendations.

This article contradicts you and suggests this is a case of the guidelines catching up with the science and medical advice.

Also: women typically have higher percentages of body fat, meaning that for the same overall weight, women have a smaller volume of water to dilute the alcohol and end up with a higher concentration. http://www.builtlean.com/2010/... Women have lower levels of alcohol dehydrogenase than men in youth but higher in middle age. http://alcalc.oxfordjournals.o...

They just recently had a rather large study over 16 years prove sitting has no impact.

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/...

Just getting tired of all the fearmongering. Medical science told everyone fat was evil, so everyone swapped to using sugar instead and started an obesity epidemic. Decades later, studies find that fat was fine and had no ill effects. Eggs, milk, gluten, all the same trends repeating themselves.

There comes a point when you can't trust any medical study on diets or broad behaviors impacting mortality.

Novel Distances for Dollo Data

...Same boat. What a vexatiously self-aggrandizing man. Excellent writing, and probably some very insightful substance that has never been summarized with the right perspective anywhere, but it really needs less Stephen Wolfram. Perhaps someone could re-edit the whole thing to exclude him—and polish the Wikipedia article while they're at it.

Unrelatedly, Turing's paper on his eponymous test is mentioned in the biography and has some hilariously sketchy logic in it. If only publishing were like that today!

Guns sitting at home do nothing.

That's not true.

http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/...

That's all very well and good. Now look at the cost of medicine today, compare it to just 30 years ago, and then tell me it hasn't been driven in very large part by technological advances, which hasn't significantly improved outcomes, but has driven medical care out of reach for many, keeping in mind telemedicine is seen as a cost-saving measure due in part to more spending on the technological aspect of medicine at the expense of the infrastructure.

For all your claims it isn't getting better, reality has a counter argument.

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/...

Take a look at the reality for yourself then. It is less than clear-cut, except for the fact costs have risen dramatically.

As seen from the moon, the Earth is only about two degrees across, so the proportion of projectiles blocked by it would be miniscule. Even that small effect is reduced (possibly beyond zero) by 'gravitational focusing': projectiles which come towards the moon from the direction of the Earth which would otherwise have missed can be deflected by Earth's gravity such that they hit. (And this happens more often than projectiles that would have hit being deflected so they miss.)

Here is a paper I found on gravitational focusing.

Male-to-female transsexuals have female neuron numbers in a limbic nucleus.
Kruijver FP1, Zhou JN, Pool CW, Hofman MA, Gooren LJ, Swaab DF.
Author information
Abstract

Transsexuals experience themselves as being of the opposite sex, despite having the biological characteristics of one sex. A crucial question resulting from a previous brain study in male-to-female transsexuals was whether the reported difference according to gender identity in the central part of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc) was based on a neuronal difference in the BSTc itself or just a reflection of a difference in vasoactive intestinal polypeptide innervation from the amygdala, which was used as a marker. Therefore, we determined in 42 subjects the number of somatostatin-expressing neurons in the BSTc in relation to sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and past or present hormonal status. Regardless of sexual orientation, men had almost twice as many somatostatin neurons as women (P The number of neurons in the BSTc of male-to-female transsexuals was similar to that of the females (P = 0.83). In contrast, the neuron number of a female-to-male transsexual was found to be in the male range. Hormone treatment or sex hormone level variations in adulthood did not seem to have influenced BSTc neuron numbers. The present findings of somatostatin neuronal sex differences in the BSTc and its sex reversal in the transsexual brain clearly support the paradigm that in transsexuals sexual differentiation of the brain and genitals may go into opposite directions and point to a neurobiological basis of gender identity disorder.

This is old news, with the research that led to this turn-of-the-century study being based on previous studies from the 1990s.

You can read a WSJ article that covers more ground in a simpler manner here. A more extensive treatment of sexual differentiation in the interconnections of the brains of transsexuals more closely resembling their target gender rather than their birth sex can be found here.

That transsexuals have brains that are more a match for their perceived gender than their biological sex is pretty much accepted as fact by most of the medical community. The only ones who still see this as controversial mostly have hidden agendas (religion, etc).

For decades, we've been teaching children that it's not a person's appearance that matters, it's their minds. Well, we now have proof that, in the case of transsexuals, this is especially true. Physical cause, not psychological delusion.

Think of it this way - if we were able to transplant your brain into a body of the opposite sex, you would still be the same person, and perceive that you now have the wrong body.

Sorry it's taken me a while to reply.

I'd suggest this paper, this one, and this. Tritium is obviously dangerous, but it does appear that there is a low acceptable dose. DNA can certainly be damaged by radiation emitted from radionuclides, I don't think anybody will contest that. And of course, I agree that it's too early to pin cancer cases on Fukushima. The Japanese government should be handling this better, I fully agree on that point too.

Except the clear evidence really isn't that clear, there are differences between men and women in the UK of 3 to 1.5 per 100,000 people, and thyroid cancer is up to 15 per 100,000, the peak of your referenced graph, (with an increasing trend) in the US. As the US was further away from Chernobyl, does that mean it helped people prevent thyroid cancer?

I'm not sure what the reasonable course of action is, but giving money to everyone isn't it.

I was with you until you threw that not own a gun thing in there. I'm not sure how you can see right through the terrorism smoke screen but buy the gun lie hook line and sinker.

GP is supported by evidence. I didn't even have to look hard - it was the first result of my first google search. tl;dr; you and/or your family members are more likely to die if you have a gun in the house.

Now, if you are a person who respects the lethality of a gun, are responsible enough to keep it in a safe place when not in use, and are mindful enough to teach the rest of your family how to properly handle and respect the weapon, your experience might be quite different. But let's be honest - the average person likely does none of those things. And even if you do everything right most of the time - it still takes only one lapse for things to go bad, hence the emphasis on responsibility.

The article highlights an interesting idea. However, one concern is that most sunscreens (except total blocks like zinc oxide and titanium dioxide-pasty stuff) are composed of biologically active compounds that absorb photons. They degrade quite quickly in a hot environment (typical advice is reapply every 2 hours in the sun-mostly for wearing off). For most cosmetically acceptable sunscreens they would need an environmentally protective device to keep them from degrading quite quickly. You probably shouldn't leave sunblock in a car on a hot day, or use them past expiration as they are in the unusual group of topicals that really do loose potency.

To get to your comments... Well, I'm not so sure Google is the best way to get medical info, but here's what I came up with (I'm not a dermatologist, but I am an MD).

These studies looked to see how much of the TiO2 penetrated the skin and got into blood (none to very little), but only after relatively short exposures (paywalls ahead):
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/a...
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
http://toxsci.oxfordjournals.o...
http://toxsci.oxfordjournals.o...

This one looked at "sub-chronic" exposure (2, 4, and 8 weeks):
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

Lastly, this one looked at the effects from TiO2 in makeup and while TiO2 wasn't toxic to cells, hitting it with UV radiation caused some free radical formation, whatever that means for tumorogenesis:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

Bottom line: Sunblock is probably safe and at this point is definitely better for you than constant sunburns.

The article highlights an interesting idea. However, one concern is that most sunscreens (except total blocks like zinc oxide and titanium dioxide-pasty stuff) are composed of biologically active compounds that absorb photons. They degrade quite quickly in a hot environment (typical advice is reapply every 2 hours in the sun-mostly for wearing off). For most cosmetically acceptable sunscreens they would need an environmentally protective device to keep them from degrading quite quickly. You probably shouldn't leave sunblock in a car on a hot day, or use them past expiration as they are in the unusual group of topicals that really do loose potency.

To get to your comments... Well, I'm not so sure Google is the best way to get medical info, but here's what I came up with (I'm not a dermatologist, but I am an MD).

These studies looked to see how much of the TiO2 penetrated the skin and got into blood (none to very little), but only after relatively short exposures (paywalls ahead):
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/a...
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
http://toxsci.oxfordjournals.o...
http://toxsci.oxfordjournals.o...

This one looked at "sub-chronic" exposure (2, 4, and 8 weeks):
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

Lastly, this one looked at the effects from TiO2 in makeup and while TiO2 wasn't toxic to cells, hitting it with UV radiation caused some free radical formation, whatever that means for tumorogenesis:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

Bottom line: Sunblock is probably safe and at this point is definitely better for you than constant sunburns.

It's not a given that forests act as carbon sinks, or at least as good ones. See for example this article;

"Conventional wisdom has long held that tropical rainforests act as a sink for carbon dioxide, cleansing the atmosphere of a major greenhouse gas. However, biologists studying the forests of Costa Rica are finding that rising temperatures are causing trees to grow less and to pump out more carbon dioxide, adding to an accelerating pattern of global warming."

Added to variations in the amount of carbon sequestered by trees are variations in soil emissions. Warmer climates can cause the organisms in the soild to release more carbon dioxide and methane from the soil. Complicated stuff.

"Plants only absorb light in the red visible spectrum and parts of the ultraviolet spectrum"

Nope. Red and blue are just the quickest to be absorbed, while green actually passes through more easily and bounces around more easily, and primarily powers growth under the canopy. When plants reflect (actually re-transmit) green, you're only seeing certain wavelengths of green coming back at you. That's because there are hundreds to thousands of biological pathways that works with various wavelengths of light, and are absorbing them and re-emitting a photon with a lower energy level.

Plants evolved under full spectrum sunlight. Of the visible light that makes it through the atmosphere, green has the highest amount of overall energy. For plants to not utilize it would be ungodly wasteful. Too much blue is damaging to chlorophyll. Too much red can cause premature flowering/reproduction.

Balanced white light is the way to go.

http://pcp.oxfordjournals.org/...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

I work in this field, and outside of the commercial pharma companies, the general rule is that all the data goes public and that all the code written is open source. All the big publicly funded agencies, and certainly all the research councils here in the UK, follow this principle. Admittedly some people do sit on the data a bit longer than they should before releasing it, but in principle it all goes public and freely available.

Want to find open, public data in genomic science, or contribute to an open database? - fill your boots: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/...
Want to find new open-source algorithms for genome analysis? There are so many it's hard to keep up - http://blends.debian.org/med/t...

In the EU, there is so much data in public databases they had to start a pan-European effort called ELIXIR just to try and work out how they were going to handle all the data curation work.

So, not to take anything away from this fine project, the idea that it's special because it's open source or because scientists are collaborating widely is just plain silly.

TIM

No it's not simple math, the human body is only 10% human and the 90% have evolved over aeons to be able to send chemical messages to the host to enhance the environment to suit them not us. Some of the biota in us do much better when we are obese, and our intestines are inflamed and swollen so we can't absorb nutrients as well, leaving them unabsorbed for the flora to digest instead of us. I hope you never get a fecal transplant from an obese person, then you'll find out what the little beasties can do to your waist line without regard to caloric intake.

In any event, there is plenty of evidence of biological differences in the brains of men and women...

Vaague handwaving over common-sense notions isn't systematic evidence.

It took me about 3 minutes to find the following studies showing that brain structure/chemistry is indeed different for men and women:

http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/news...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
http://nro.sagepub.com/content...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
http://www.brain-mind-institut...
http://scan.oxfordjournals.org...

The last two of the studies listed above don't just show gender specific biological differences in the brain, they link the differences to skills/behavior.

Honestly, a trained chimp could find this stuff. Why is it you can't?

Your faith in the testing regimen is kinda cute. The fact is that it isn't rigorous by any measure. E.g., no human trial has ever been conducted on the safety of GMO foods. And, GMO testing has been completely non-existent for long-term effects.

This is me calling you out for just inventing your concerns out of shear blind ignorance. Here's just a couple results from a quick look with google you could've done too if you cared about the issue like you seem to.
A 38-d feeding study evaluated whether standard broiler diets prepared with transgenic Event 176-derived "Bt" corn (maize) grain had any adverse effects on male or female broiler chickens as compared to diets prepared with nontransgenic (isogenic) control corn grain... it was clear that the transgenic corn had no deleterious effects in this study.

That led to a 3 generation study in rats: ...long-term consumption of transgenic Bt corn throughout three generation did not cause severe health concerns on rats. Therefore, long-term feeding studies with GM crops should be performed on other species...

Followed on by a 10 generation study of quail:
A ten-generation experiment with growing and laying quails were carried out to test diets with 40 (starter) or 50% (grower, layer) isogenic or transgenic (Bt 176) corn. Feeding of diets containing genetically-modified corn did not significantly influence health and performance of quails nor did it affect DNA-transfer and quality of meat and eggs of quails compared with the isogenic counterpart.

But I'm sure you'll come right back declaring see, no long term human studies, to which I might observe that a 10 generation human study doesn't look much different than an outright eternal and perpetual ban for no reason at all except your own fear born of the ignorant belief that specifically choosing a mutation by hand is somehow terrifically more dangerous than the more traditional use of entirely random mutations instead.

BT corn, potatoes, etc. have every cell in the "food" containing the BT toxin (these "foods" must be registered with the FDA as pesticides).

But, then why did the FDA state on their site: FDA has concluded that the presence of Bt 10 corn in the food and feed supply poses no safety concerns. and Foods from genetically engineered plants that have been evaluated by FDA through the consultation process have not gone on the market until the FDA’s questions about the safety of such products have been resolved.

Wait a minute, are you just making stuff up again?

We also know that herbicides like Roundup are carcinogens, and that GMO is mostly used to spray larger volumes of herbicides on crops. And, that record quantities of herbicides are now being sprayed throughout the life cycle of these crops.

Quick question for you, don't worry I'll provide answers for you too. First, kudos for having heard someone pass on to you that studies did find that eating pure roundup for generations DID increase the risk of certain cancers in rats.
Q. When Roundup is sprayed on a crop, how long does the residue last before newly planted crops won't die?
A. Many seeds can be planted the day after, some more sensitive ones though you might be better to wait 3 days though.

Q.How many insects and animals in the field die?
A.Only the ones that were caught under the sprayer's tires.

Q.How much roundup is still present in the crop when it comes off the field?
A.It's already virtually unmeasurable.

Q.How much is still left when the product hits the market?
A.See above.

Oh and the fear of record quantities of herbicides being sprayed on farms? Sorry, that's more F

"What Phillips is doing in this 'Growwise indoor farm' is wasting more energy than it needs to --- plants do not need green lights, that is why their leaves are green colored"

Wrong.

http://pcp.oxfordjournals.org/...

But you keep getting suckered by LED Marketing. Meanwhile, anybody who actually paid attention to real credible research within the past half decade+ knows better. Philips obviously doesn't have a clue.

" For example, chlorophyll, the dye molecule used by many plants, only absorbs significantly in relatively narrow bands of the blue and red [wikipedia.org], corresponding to 2% of the total solar irradiant power."

WRONG.

http://pcp.oxfordjournals.org/...

This is why you should never, EVER rely upon Wikipedia, people.

Guess why HPS lighting works so well for growing weed and other crops despite being extremely heavy in green output? It sure isn't the piss-piddly amount of red and orange coming from it, nor is it the huge amount of IR.

...

I think it comes down to this: why there is a big cold spot in the CMB? Because there's a big void. Mystery solved!

Except there's still the mystery of why there is such a big void in the first place.

That is true, but it is a much lesser mystery. The previous record-holder was the Canes Venatici Supervoid at 1.3 billion light years, and an Eridanus Supervoid has been the preferred explanation for the Eridanus Cold Spot (or, humorously, CAOE: "Cosmic Axis Of Evil) for years ("parallel universe collisions" was always an exotic explanation), but the existence of such a supervoid had not been confirmed. Dr. István Szapudi of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa has has just announced findings that measures this supervoid at 1.8 billion light years. This is moderately bigger than the previous record-holder (40% wider), but there are quite a few that are 400-800 million light years across. This looks rather like a power law distribution, often found in nature.

The Canes Venatici Supervoid is closer as than the Eridanus Supervoid (red shift z=0.118 vs 0.22, or 1.5 vs 2.5 billion light years) as well as being smaller so there are two reasons for the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe Effect to be weaker, but apparently there is no anomalous cooling for that void at all. I would like to see someone address that.

The study of many exoplanets will inform work here on climate. Planetary scientists have studied Mars, Venus and Jupiter's weather for many decades and you can be certain this has lead to many insights into Earth's climate.
For example if you write 3 computer programs to predict weather and one of them works also on Mars and Venus, then you know it has a better understanding of weather.
Just imagine when they find 100 Earthlike rocky planets orbiting at 1AU and discover what weather is like in such systems - that will massively inform earth climate http://www.space.com/2071-stor.... This makes Jupiter a test case of climate change prediction software. If the software can explain what happened on Jupiter it can inform what is happening here.
or http://astrogeo.oxfordjournals... (cosmic rays affect climate)

You do realize that when you make a statement like that, it takes only a single counterexample to prove you wrong?

Irony abound.

http://www.whas11.com/story/news/2015/03/10/campbellsville-police-child-shot-in-leg-by-parent-repairing-gun/24698611/
http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/Texas-Boy-6-Hospitalized-After-Shot-By-Little-Brother-294704731.html
http://abc13.com/news/4-year-old-dead-in-accidental-shooting-in-north-harris-county/539586/
http://www.chron.com/houston/article/Child-wounded-in-gunfire-in-NW-Harris-County-6105827.php

For every news story that shows someone shooting in self defence, there are half a dozen stories about someone being shot by accident. Statistics have shown you're far more likely to shoot yourself of someone you care about with unsecured firearms around the house.

No. The human brain is not made to last.

http://cercor.oxfordjournals.o...

Even with VERY mature stem cell based regenerative medicine, there is going to be problems with the buildup of neurotoxic metabolites within the brain over time, This is essentially what alzheimer's disease is (but the jury is still out on weather the creation of amyloid beta plaques and/or tau tangles is causal or symptomatic.)

http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...

The brain does not seem to have a very good elimination system for the purging of toxic metabolic biproducts, which causes slow, cumulative damage over time.

You are going to have to do some rather invasive interventions with genetically engineered glial cells and other neural progenitor cells to prop up human brains if you intend to have biological immortality.

There was a recent case of a normal weight woman getting a fecal transplant from an obese donor, and now this woman has become obese but not changed her diet and lifestyle.

Yeah, I'd say a conclusion from this one case study is pretty darn premature. Here's the actual paper. Both the woman and her daughter (the donor) were borderline overweight (~BMI 26) before the transplant. Both the mother AND the daughter gained significant weight after the transplant (30-35 lbs. each).

By your logic, we could also attribute the daughter's weight gain to the fact that she donated stool -- which wouldn't make any sense, but is also consistent with the data.

I don't know where you get that she had "not changed her diet and lifestyle." That's not mentioned in the study. All it says is that the woman unintentionally gained a lot of weight (as did her daughter), and she apparently had tried to control it but was unsuccessful. Lots of people in their early 30s start to gain weight.

Also, I should note that the condition she was treated for caused severe digestive discomfort. Many of those symptoms lessened after treatment. Could it have been that suddenly she started eating more because it no longer made her feel terrible?? (And it looks like her daughter joined her in the new binge, if her weight change shows anything....)

Anyhow, I have no idea what this one case study shows. But (1) the woman was borderline overweight before the treatment, (2) both she and her daughter the donor experienced similar weight gain, which could point to a common shift in dietary eating habits in the household -- perhaps to foods that were more caloric but would previously have caused the mother digestive distress, and (3) she had a condition that would have made eating too much unenjoyable, but that disease was mostly cured.

Suggestive? Perhaps. But I wouldn't conclude too much on the basis of this case study, unless there's information that's not in the official published account that could establish better causality.

Here's a link to the actual study.

In brief:
Woman weighed 136 pounds, daughter weight 140 pounds. After transplant from daughter to woman, she didn't return for 16 months (according to my reading of the article). The woman had gained up to 177 pounds, while the daughter gained up to 170 pounds.

So this is more a case report than an study. Journals are used for communication between professionals. This doctor is saying, "hey, something weird happened.....it might be a coincidence (there is a lot wrong with this woman), but keep an eye out for anything similar."

For one, he didn't choose countries randomly but instead selected only those likely to prove his beliefs, including Yugoslavia, Finland and Italy. Excluded were France, land of the famously healthy omelet eater, as well as other countries where people consumed a lot of fat yet didn't suffer from high rates of heart disease, such as Switzerland, Sweden and West Germany.

France as a country eating a lot fat! WTF?!!? Are you a fucking idiots? Do you also believe to no-go zones?

Age-standardized mortality from ischaemic heart disease in European regions (men; age group 45–74 years; year 2000).

How can an unvaccinated kid infect and kill your child if your child was vaccinated?

No vaccine is 100% effective. So "herd immunity" still marginally benefits the vaccinated.

How can an unvaccinated kid infect and kill your child if your child was vaccinated?

No vaccine is 100% effective. So "herd immunity" still marginally benefits the vaccinated.

So show me a study on how effective the vaccine is? There are lots of other reasons for disease rates plummeting which are more to do with isolation practices and good hygenie.

http://www.amazon.com/Dissolvi...

This is a lift from an AC post

Where is the evidence for a working measles vaccine? There is no blinded RCT. It sure sounds like the observational evidence is confounded.

“A likely reason for this is that the case may have been misdiagnosed as a non-specific viral illness. Measles has become relatively uncommon in Singapore with two decades of widespread measles vaccination, and especially after the second dose policy was implemented in 1998. Many primary care doctors may not even see a single case of measles in a year. This makes diagnosis more difficult.”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

“This was not a blind study, since the investigators knew which children had received measles vaccine. It seems probable that the occurrence of so much ‘measles-like’ illness in the vaccinated children was a reflexion of the difficulty in making a firm diagnosis of measles in the African child at one visit.”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

“As only approximately 7% of the clinically-diagnosed cases of measles reported locally turned out to be measles by laboratory testing, there is a need for laboratory confirmation of measles to avoid misidentification of cases and improve disease surveillance.(2)”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

“Before the introduction of measles vaccines, measles virus infected 95%–98% of children by age 18 years [1–4], and measles was considered an inevitable rite of passage. Exposure was often actively sought for children in early school years because of the greater severity of measles in adults.”

http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/...

"“It is evident from Table IV that many children in all three groups were unwell and that the proportion was greatest in the live-vaccine group (61 %), less in the killed/live-vaccine group (54%), and least in the unvaccinated group (38%)...
Table VI shows the cases of measles reported by the parents and those seen and diagnosed by the doctor. Of the total cases reported the doctor saw about 60%, and, of these, confirmed the parents' diagnosis in 93 % in the control group, 64% in the killed/live-vaccine group, and 70% in the live vaccine group."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

"Measles
Evidence from cohort studies
Effectiveness against measles was investigated in three cohort studies (Marin 2006; Marolla 1998; Ong 2007)...
There was a lack of adequate description of exposure (vaccine content and schedules) in all cohort studies. Another recurring problem was the failure of any study to provide descriptions of all outc

Human health is a complex topic with many interwoven factors that interact with each other. In general, many people who catch many "diseases" don't show significant symptoms because their immune system deals with it and limits the scope of the spread. I was not easily able to find that information about measles from a few minutes of trying though. It seems a bit controversial... Maybe you know if off-hand?
"Risk Analysis for Measles Reintroduction After Global Certification of Eradication"
http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/...
"Convention holds that asymptomatic measles infections are rare, but there is a significant body of published evidence of acute measles infection among people who are exposed to measles virus but who do not develop classic symptoms [3-5]."

When you boost your immune system, you make it more likely the spread will be contained. Even for measles, the degree of symptoms you show and how long they last is in general probably going to reflect your health state (and also genetics though), as suggested in a link a bit further below to a study from CDC researchers. Humans are exposed to all sorts of potentially problematical viruses and bacteria every day -- doctors especially. A healthy immune system shrugs most of them off (with some dangerous exceptions, especially like Ebola).

A study specific to measles and nutrition, from India:
"Interaction between nutrition and measles"
http://link.springer.com/artic...
"Much has been written about the synergestic interaction and infection in turn adversely affects the nutritional status. Although this relationship is well documented with respect to bacterial infections, it is not clear whether nutrition can influence the incidence or course of viral diseases. Measles is one of the most common viral infections that occur during childhood. The interactions between measles and nutritional status acquire considerable importance in situations where as a result of inadequate food intake, chronic malnutrition is widespread among children."

And:
"Undernutrition as an underlying cause of child deaths associated with diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria, and measles"
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/cont...
"Results: The RR of mortality because of low weight-for-age was elevated for each cause of death and for all-cause mortality. Overall, 52.5% of all deaths in young children were attributable to undernutrition, varying from 44.8% for deaths because of measles to 60.7% for deaths because of diarrhea.
Conclusion: A significant proportion of deaths in young children worldwide is attributable to low weight-for-age, and efforts to reduce malnutrition should be a policy priority."

So if 50% of the death rate is from obvious malnutrition, could at least some of the rest be from more subtle dietary issues?

In the USA from 2010, just to show how the USA is in theory increasingly at risk of an epidemic from malnutrition among children:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
"According to a new report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 17.4 million American families - almost 15 percent of U.S. households - are now "food insecure," an almost 30 percent increase since 2006. This means that, during any given month, they will be out of money, out of food, and forced to miss meals or seek assistance to feed themselves. Even those who get three meals a day may be malnourished. Americans increasingly eat cheap, sugary foods whose production is underwritten by government subsidies for the corn and dairy industries. As the New York Times reported this month, the USDA loudly promotes better eating habits while quietly working with Domino's to develop a new line of pizzas with 40 percent more cheese. [There are healthy fats though, including from ch

No one ever said "Tobacco kills."

Tobacco kills.